Nothing good can ever come from reading an extreme-left website like Vox.com, but sometimes we do things against our better instincts. Part of being human. Unfortunately, reading this tripe inevitably invites indigestion and headache. Especially when the subject is Mr. Donald Trump.
In a long (long) screed published Tuesday, Vox’s David Roberts explained to his audience of college liberals “the real reason the media is rising up against Donald Trump.” Using thousands of words that would have been better off deleted, Roberts first fails to prove that there is any such uprising and then fails to prove that he’s discovered the reasons why. Sounds like an article ready to hit the internet.
According to Roberts, Trump has brought political lying to a whole new level:
As everyone acknowledges, politicians have always lied. So what’s going on here? How are Trump’s lies different? Are they just more voluminous, more flagrant? Or is there something deeper going on that has unsettled the media establishment?
His argument, in a nutshell, is that Trump is the monster that the Republican establishment has created. Not by ignoring their responsibilities in Washington but by drumming up anger in the conservative base. “Republican billionaires and political operators have spent decades building a self-contained epistemic bubble in which they could pump up the right-wing base with fear and paranoia,” he writes. “Now the Frankenstein’s monster has lumbered off the table and crashed into the cocktail party.”
To back up his point, Roberts claims that Republicans have complained about the liberal media for so long that it has “left journalists terrified of passing judgment on any matter of controversy.”
HA!
No, again: HA!
In what world are these journalists afraid of putting their opinion into the mix? The mainstream media is almost nothing BUT opinion these days – to the point where liberal tripe like Vox is entirely redundant. And in Roberts’ view, it’s conservatives who are running around in a fantasy world? How does one get this far from common sense and observation and still possess enough intelligence to open a laptop, much less write a small novel?
“The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee,” he writes. But because Trump is not afraid of being called out and proven wrong, the media is being forced to take sides and prove their relevance. That’s apparently the point Roberts was getting at.
A disinterested referee.
That the media has been taken by surprise this year is certainly true enough. But this idea that Trump’s candidacy is so outrageous that these networks are being forced to abandon their objectivity is just…idiotic to the point that it’s actually laughable. This is the same media that spent the year or so leading up to Trump’s announcement going all-in for the Black Lives Matter movement? The media that shamelessly carried water for a series of police brutality stories that were wrought with fiction? That media?
If the networks and the newspapers are coming to terms with their own fading relevance, it’s not because of Donald Trump or Fox News. It’s because they overstepped their own boundaries. The American people are willing to accept a certain amount of liberal bias in their news; after all, most of us have never known anything else. But over the last couple of years – and really since Ferguson – they’ve overplayed their hand. They went too far. If they’ve lost their influence, they have no one to blame but themselves.
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